Federico Guzmán | Botanical clock. Equinoctial plant garden

The Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía presents, on the occasion of the FLORA Festival and in the third year of collaboration, the work “Botanical clock. Garden of equinoctial plants” by Federico Guzmán (Seville, 1964).

In his book Somnus plantarum (The sleep of plants) the botanist Charles Linnaeus describes in a poetic way how different plants prepare to sleep during the night by closing their flowers. Based on the Horologium Florae (floral clock) devised in 1748 by the botanist in Uppsala (Sweden), Guzmán has conceived a botanical clock for the FLORA Festival at the C3A in Córdoba.

It is a growing bed of circadian plants-called by Linnaeus Aequinoctales-because they open and close their flowers at regular intervals during the day and night throughout their growing season. This living calendar reconnects us with the chronobiological cycles of nature beyond the manipulation of time, based on artificial mechanisms and systems. What is of direct interest is how time is perceived, controlled, exploited, manipulated, institutionalized and internalized. The politics of time is, in short, a politics of control.